Saturday, 15 November 2014

Devoxx 2014 - Whiteboard votes

As is traditional, the attendees of Devoxx vote on certain topics on whiteboards.
Each result must be treated with care - there is no validation process, and only a fraction of the
3500 attendees actually bother to vote.
Nevertheless, the results can be interesting.

What version of Java do you use at work right now?

A high level question focussed on Java at the day job.
Java 8 hasn't surpassed Java 6 yet, but it is doing pretty well.
Remember that Java 7 is End-Of-Life in April 2015!

Java 9

1

Java 8

63

Java 7

160

Java 6

81

Java 5

11

Java 4

3

Java 3

1

Dalvik

6

Other

4

What IDE do you use?

A sense of how the IDE market is looking.
The interesting data point is how Eclipse is falling - compare with 2008,
where Eclipse led IntelliJ by almost 2 to 1, and NetBeans by almost 4 to 1.
Sadly, the absolute number of votes is a lot lower than 6 years ago, so be careful with comparisons.

Eclipse

36

NetBeans

26

IntelliJ

75

Vi/vim

8

Other

1

Beyond this, I heard various people comment on IBM's apparent withdrawal of funding for Eclipse IDE
and what that might mean looking forward.

What JVM language are you using?

An attempt to see what languages people are using.
Whenever this is asked, it is always an opportunity for advocates of a language to
push hard, so again take the results with a good pinch of salt:

Java

214

Scala

64

Groovy

62

Clojure

15

Rhino/JS

6

Ceylon

3

Kotlin

1

Cobol

1

Is merging Scala into Java a good idea?

An odd question with a predictable answer - WTF!

Yes

3

No

26

WTF?! seriously?

52

Depends

2

What JavaScript framework/library do you use?

An open question that showed a clear dominance for Angular.

Angular

51

Ember

4

Reactive

2

Backbone

6

Knockout

7

Angular-Dart

3

Dojo

5

JQuery

9

Meteor

2

Is this the end for Angular?

Angular 2.0 - "no migration path, not backwards compatible".
Whether this is factually correct or not, this was the question asked.

Yes

4

No

47

Maybe

12

Hate JavaScript

24

Follow GWT

1

What desktop UI technology have you used in the last 3 years?

A sense of where the desktop UI is today.
Given that JavaFX has only been truly useful in Java SE 8, its not a bad showing for FX.

None

39

Swing

41

JavaFX

15

MS .NET

10

Chrome apps

2

Eclipse RCP

14

NetBeans platform

2

QT

5

VCL

1

CLI

4

OGLPHI

1

Applet

2

Broswer/HTML

7

How do you create WebApps?

An open question on web technologies.
Bear in mind that some options were added after others, notably JAX-RS+JavaScript, which was
added long after REST+JavaScript.
I think its fair to say that there are an odd mix of answers, but a clear leader in REST + JavaScript.

JSF+JavaEE

44

REST+JavaScript

101

JAX-RS+JavaScript

9

Play

23

Swing MVC

76

Wicket

26

JavaScript library

50

Grails

8

GWT

30

Vaadin

20

Apache Sling

6

WebSockets+JavaScript

6

Spray+AkkaHTTP

6

Ruby on Rails

2

ZK framework

4

OmniFaces

4

PrimeFaces

10

REST+Dart

2

Fluent-HTTP

1

AngularJS

23

Polymer

3

By hand, with love

2

Web motion

3

Struts v1 or v2

11

Beehive

2

JRuby

3

Bootstrap

2

What one thing would you add to Java (your top priority)?

A traditional Devoxx question, with a long shopping list of answers, as always.
Note however that Brian Goetz indicated strongly that properties as a language
feature is not happening.

Properties

54

Better handling of null

33

Multi-line strings

33

Safe null dereference

23

Interpolation of strings

22

Immutability

21

Value types

16

Unsigned int

11

Too bloated!

8

Better logging

7

Pattern matching

8

Sub-package scope

4

Tail recursion

3

Solve expression problem

2

Algorithmic data types

2

Class versioning

2

Cluster aware JVM

1

Performance

1

Free$ embedded support

1

Inner functions

1

Generators and co-routines

1

Operator overloading

1 (plus 2 minus 1 !)

Enterprise modularity

1

Summary

Lots of interesting, and no doubt slightly dubious, statistics to examine.
Use with care, and congratulations to the Devoxx team for another great conference!